For anyone whose complaint about OSC aka OpenSoundControl is that it lacks broad hardware support, I have one word for you:

Unicorns.

OSC now runs on magical unicorns. (Would a unicorn not want high-resolution, human-readable messages encoded with time-stamps? I think they would. And because OSC is transport-independent, it can absolutely run on magical Unicorn Beams.)

No idea what this post is about? Don’t worry — I’ll have a talking unicorn narrate a proper, sophisticated, complete introduction to OSC for beginners soon. They’re magical, so they can make complex topics lucid to any audience.

Yesterday, I wrote, entirely tongue in cheek and not expecting anything to actually come of it:

I think maybe I’ll start running screaming headlines with things I want in them, if only for good luck. Tomorrow on CDM: “You Know What Annoys Me? The Fact That We Don’t Have Unicorns. Magic Unicorns. Who Speak OSC.”

Today, via Twitter, Max patcher and audiovisual Merlock Andrew Lovett-Barron of Toronto wrote to me:

@peterkirn I made you a unicorn that speaks OSC.

And here it is, for your enjoyment, in Max 5 patch format:

http://andrewlb.com/max/Oscicorn_for_CDM.maxpat

This is, of course, very silly. But it’s an excuse to pitch Andrew’s site, which has lots of patching and coding goodies and visual creations:

http://andrewlb.com/

And perhaps more importantly, OSC now has a mascot. That means t-shirts, plushies, costumes, the lot. Your job: what should the name of this unicorn be?

All MIDI has is an antiquated DIN cable. Oh, yeah, that and millions of compatible devices. We hope OSC support won’t be as rare as unicorns.

Side note: please don’t troll this post, tempting as that may be. It’ll make the unicorn cry.

If you think culture has become too disconnected from the Earth, “Harvest” and the Terrafon instrument surely count as a shock to the system. A traditional ensemble picks up an enormous tone arm and transducer and, through back-breaking labor, drag it across arable fields. It’s part sound art and performance, part agriculture. But it certainly counts as a gramophone – it’s just a really big one that reads the grooves of the earth.

Beat juggling with two of these I’m guessing is largely out of the question.

One half of the artistic creative team, Olle Cornéer, writes with a description:

Harvest (2009) is a new art piece for the new instrument terrafon, traditional ensemble and cropland – by Olle Cornéer and Martin Lübcke.

In this performance Alunda Church Choir, conducted by Cantor Jan Hällgren, plays the soil of northern Uppland (in Sweden) on terrafon. Harvest by Alunda Kyrkokör was exhibited at the Volt Festival in Uppsala the 6th of June 2009. Terrafon is a large agricultural version of the horn gramophone, amplifying the sounds in the track it ploughs.

There is more to come. There are still many croplands still untouched by terrafon. The only thing needed is a powerful local musical ensemble that can sweat it out. This is indeed a demanding piece.

Video illustrates what this all means in practice:

Harvest by Alunda Kyrkokör (2009) from Olle Corneer on Vimeo.

The artistic duo behind the work is a fascinating collaboration. Olle is a producer and musician, while partner-in-crime Martin Lübcke has a PhD in theoretical physics, specializing in superstring theory. That has been the grounds on which their other work, Bacterial Orchestra, explores ideas both of biological epidemics and multi-celled organisms and neural networks. Of course, to make it truly multi-celled, they’ve made the piece an iPhone creation. (I think some folks have found the iPhone phenomenon to be viral as is, so this seems somewhat appropriate.)

Public Epidemic No 1 from Olle Corneer on Vimeo.

Every cell listens to its surroundings and picks up sounds, trying to play together in a musical way. The musical material comes from the background noise, people talking or sounds played by other cells.

Every cell has a unique DNA. Only the ones that are musical fit enough survives. If
the surroundings doesn’t meet up to its conditions – too noisy, too quiet or no distinct
pulse – the cell dies and is reborn with a new, hopefully better, set of DNA.

The result is a musical organism adapting to and changing its environment, growing and evolving with other cells and spectators.

More on that piece:
http://www.bacterialorchestra.com

It’s nice to me that, while these works are both conceptual, you might not guess they came from the same team. I wonder what will come next.

Clean is overrated. If you’re ready for a little digital dirt in your synth life, powered by the open-source Arduino hardware, Marc Nostromo’s Squealer is for you. Built atop the wonderful, Arduino-based Pocket Piano kit by Critter and Guitari, it’s a full-blown, simple, digitally-gritty synthesis engine.

You get a monosynth, some fixed waveforms, a resonant filter, decay, and some aliasing tricks for extra grit. The big news: the Arduino Piano Squealer is now under a GPL license.

Official Arduino Piano Squealer Synth Page has everything you need
Announcement of GPL v3
All at Mustalk@noisepages.com

Here’s what it sounds like:

SAP+BOM+Dodgey Eighties Ringing Reverb:
apbom.mp3

Eery piano:
ap-eery.mp3

SAP+Flanging Mini KP:
ardboy1.mp3

Given a choice between boring and crazy, I always choose crazy. After all, craziness is part of the artistic persona. So bring it on.

It’s been a while since we had a celebrity saying things that didn’t really make sense. It’d be unfair to ask Ricardo Villalobos live up to some of the titans – Bob Dylan saying CDs have “no stature” and “have sound all over them,” and Elton’ John’s classic call to “tear down the Internet.” (Not to mention, in the end I think we wound up agreeing with them and turned Elton’s quote into a brand-new verb.) As with Elton John and Bob Dylan, I love and respect Villalobos’ work, no less so as he says things with which I disagree. But Ricardo Villalobos does get special credit for claiming in a recent Resident Advisor interview, among other things, that what has really hurt sound quality today is the lack of cheap drum machines from the 80s, because they were analog. Or they weren’t, but it was as if they were. Or something. (If you think this might earn some ire from Ableton loyalists, you’re right.)

No. I think the development is going in the opposite direction because everyone is making tracks in programs like Ableton, which has an OK sound engine. When I started making music 20 years ago, you had to at least buy a mixer, then some synthesizers, a drum machine—which is the best quality possible of a sampled drum. There was a pureness of the source of the music. It was analog, direct.

Ah, yes, the good old days. Back in the day, digital samples of acoustic instruments played through digital-to-analog-converters were real digital samples of acoustic instruments played through digital -to-analog-converters. It was analog, direct – well, aside from the fact that it was digital and not direct, but it was real … um … analog … digital. Pulse code modulation was real, pure pulse code modulation, not like the pulse code modulation you kids have today. Not like now, when people don’t … own… mixers. It’s not like you kids today, you people who use Ableton, people like… Ricardo Villalobos. (Villalobos is, in fact, a notable Live user.)

I mean, at least it’s a novel argument. Usually, you get the “mixing in the box is bad” and “computers aren’t real” argument from crusty audio engineers with massive outboard analog mixing boards, not electronic musicians. Recently, many experienced engineers I’ve talked to have come to the side of accepting that “in-the-box” recordings in software can be just as good as their analog counterparts. So, we may have reached a real landmark, a world in which electronic musicians claim digital’s no good and turntables are the only way to listen, while engineers experienced with analog claim just the opposite.

Let’s go back in time. For the record, twenty years ago by my calculations would be 1989.

The drum machine you might have bought then could be the Alesis HR-16, or perhaps a Roland TR-707. They’re fantastic, unique-sounding instruments. But “the best quality possible” is not generally a phrase associated with instruments of this era. We love them because they aren’t 192kHz, 64-bit multisamples recorded from 30 microphones and shipped on a 100 GB hard drive, because “quality” isn’t actually everything. And if you bought a new mixer in 1989, I assume you picked up something like Mackie’s just-released LM-1602, rather than an SSL. Of course, you really could go do that now. In fact, Ableton Live recently added 64-bit processing in the signal chain; the software that does more aliasing to account for lower bitrates is actually Pro Tools.

He goes on:

The thing is, you have the limitation of the program, the limitation of the digital mixing which is happening inside the computer, you have the limitation of the sound sources of the synthesizers—the virtual synthesizers. Even the sound engine is playing a very big role in the whole sound of the product. If you have a good turntable and good speakers, you can hear it is made in Ableton. Logic, for example, is very neutral in sound but Ableton…you can hear it in two seconds.

It’s hard to know where to begin. Live does have an overused sound – but that comes from people using effects presets as-is, people not knowing how to mix, people time stretching and warping without adjusting settings or taking care to think about the impact on its sound.

The idea that you have to use a turntable to hear these things, or generally to hear quality issues in a track produced entirely digitally is… well, an interesting theory. (It’d be like testing the fidelity of your inkjet printer by first taking a Polaroid of the output.)

They have all of these virtual instruments that are calculated by a computer, and you have a certain space where you have to put everything. And when you want to leave this space, you have to live with compromises, the compromises of digital mixes and recordings.

Now, perhaps I’m wrong, but I thought that if for some reason you thought you needed to mix on an analog board and record to, say, analog reel-to-reel, you were no less able to do that with the analog outs of your MacBook Pro than with your 606.

And what exactly was in those vintage drum machines, if not a computer making  calculations? Eleven secret herbs and spices? Elves with slide rules?

But this is the beauty of interviews – you can say whatever you want. And it definitely beats boring.

There is also one statement with which I wholeheartedly agree:

People are finding it easy to publish something without any controls. And this is the problem with the internet in general. There is so much information, and no one knows if it’s true or not. It’s just there. It’s an information monster.

It’s almost as though the Internet is a place in which people can make any wild claim they wish, without anyone questioning its basis in reality or fact.

http://www.residentadvisor.net/feature.aspx?1128

It may be 2009, but you can still play electronic music as though you’re an invading alien visitor from the future. Just ask The Sonic Manipulator, an electronic musical performer and inventor, alias Claude Woodward. His musical creations range from warped radios to instruments derived from turntable scratches and Theremins. And then there are some instruments that seem to be sonic weapons. (Apologies to recent protesters in Pittsburgh.)

CDM reader Andrew Cordani caught Claude at the UK’s British Invention Show. Claude is apparently a Perth, Australia transplant, by way of Cambridge, though Andrew writes that he “has been known to travel about a bit (Mars, Venus, Jupiter, Alpha Centauri, Epsilon Indi, Teegarden’s star and further).”

Andrew describes Claude’s other creations:

Met at the British Invention Show (http://www.britishinventionshow.com/show/index.html), at Alexandra Palace (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Palace)
(Organized by [MP3 player inventor] Kane Kramer – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kane_Kramer)

http://www.youtube.com/user/sonicmanipulator

http://www.sonicmanipulator.com/

http://www.sonicmanipulator.com/Inventions.htm

The Claude-a-tron – a sort of pre-wireless (i.e. wired) Theremin – and is “Way cool”

The Radiolian a lot of fun – Essentially triggerable (pre-recorded) radio samples – Used to switch-between radio programs (reminds me of http://www.neave.com/television/ )

The Greet-o-metre + The Transatron should be given out to all travellers, interstellar or not!

(My fave was the Rap Rod – which does for scratching what CDs did for vinyl. The Bash-a-tron was a close second, though)

Definitely check the Sonic Manipulator site for many, many more bizarre creations if the one at top doesn’t impress you. See a couple of my faves at bottom.

Fans of DIY, the whole event sounds fantastic! Thanks, Andrew, who can be found here (with his own futuristic creations):
http://midisticks.ltd.uk/

I don’t know if it’s “the most revolutionary new musical instrument of the last 60 years,” but let’s be clear on one thing: the Eigenharp Alpha is utterly, beautifully insane. It combines breath and finger input in a bassoon form factor, but with quite a lot more physical control, a computer connection, and no internal sound source of its own. The breath input comes from a crooked tube as on a bassoon, with finger input in a touch strip, a fretted, light-up keyboard, and keys that have their own various forms of expression. Launched yesterday in London, the Eingenharp is getting a lot of attention. (And yes, some of you spotted signs of its launch all the way back in June, to which I say – I’m sorry I’m so late to the party.)

From BBC: Do you drum it, strum it or stroke it?

I hope to speak to the creators soon. Already, I see some indications that there are equal parts genius and madness here. The controller itself, even in the bizarre bassoon form factor, has an extraordinary amount of control, with high-resolution keys, percussion keys, elaborate control arrangements that can adjust tone or record samples, and extremely precise breath and touch. At £3,950, many computer musicians accused of “knob twiddling” by the creators probably won’t be able to afford the top-of-the-line model, but I do believe an instrument like this can easily, fairly cost this much, it’s a cost reasonable for musical instruments – and there is a £349 “Pico” edition for mortals.

There’s some madness, too, however. For the “instrument of the future,” the creators appear to have chosen MIDI, via USB, in place of a modern control protocol. Then, they plug the instrument into proprietary Mac software. (A Windows version is expected early next year.) There are software models of a Cello, a Clarinet, and a Synth, but there are also gigs of samples oddly loaded into SoundFont format. Given the futuristic ambitions and the sky-high price, closed software and antiquated I/O seem puzzling to me. I’m also skeptical of the approach here of piling on as many controllers as possible.

CORRECTION – CORRECTION! Yes, indeed – proprietary software and the limitations of MIDI wouldn’t make any sense – and apparently the creators agree. So the software will be open sourced, as will their custom-designed protocol. I’ve got all the details – required reading for anyone working on expressive instruments.

But don’t get me wrong. I think this fascinatingly bizarre instrument is worth exploring. The hardware design looks exceptionally luxurious, and there is some genuine design innovation in the controller the likes of which we’ve never seen in an instrument beyond a prototype or two.

Oh, and yes, I already want the Pico – and I think the Pico’s fewer controls may actually make more sense.

Basic specs:

Video of the key action, among others collected on YouTube:

The “Alpha,” the flagship:

• 120 keys, plus 12 percussion keys. (Wait — 120? Yes, you read that right.)
• Two strip controllers, one on each side.
• Breath pipe and mouthpiece.
• 11-bit resolution (2048 values) in the keys and strip controllers, 12-bit resolution (4098 values) for breath.
• Internal audio interface with mic pre, converters, and headphone out – so you need to carry this and a computer, but not this, a computer, and an audio interface.
• A “Base Station” with inputs for expression pedals and foot switches, which also contains the USB connection. This connects to a floor spike on which the instrument rests.

http://www.eigenlabs.com/alpha/

The Pico:

• 22 keys (18 for playing, four mode switches).
• Keys work via direct pressure and lateral pressure in both directions, as on the Alpha.
• Breath pipe.
• Strip controller.
• Same resolution: 11-bit keys, 12-bit breath.
• £349.

http://www.eigenlabs.com/pico/

To be honest, I’m quite a lot more interested in the Pico, not because I think cheaper is better, but because I’m curious whether you can’t be just as expressive with the more limited set of controls as with the kitchen sink approach of its big brother. After all, 22 keys is roughly the number you’d find on most reed instruments, including the Bassoon. True, the piano has 88 keys, but it also doesn’t really have anything else – and it’s able to have so many because of its form factor.

In fact, I’m sorry, but I love the Pico. It looks friendly, it looks portable, it isn’t terrifying-looking like the Alpha, and it seems it’d be more at home in a variety of musical venues than the Alpha. Sometimes less is more. Let’s see if I prove to be correct.

The software, though I hope you could also customize your own software rig using the MIDI input:

• Modular, allowing the routing of control inputs, sound sources and samples, loopers, and synthesis and effects.
• SoundFont oscillator.
• Physical models of the clarinet, cello.
• AU host for adding your own plug-ins. (And yes, this is where I think you’ll have the most fun.
• A system for triggering events, takes, key, and mapping scale.
• An interactive arrangement system for step sequencing.
• Oddly, an extensive Steinway D multi-sample. On the other hand, for years we’ve all have been playing bassoon and other reed samples on the keyboard, and in organ form for centuries, so now the reed instrument gets its revenge.

Source: Eigenlabs software specs.

The instrument’s creator, John Lambert, repeats the maxim heard at new instrument design conferences: “We’ve got pretty fed up with watching people twiddle knobs on stage.” Naturally, that means… turning to the Bassoonist, that sex icon of the orchestra? I’ll run with it.

One other tidbit from that article:

He says there is one high-profile musician who is about to take delivery of an Eigenharp, but won’t give any names.

Yeah, Herbie Hancock, we know it’s you. (Okay, they are an English company, so maybe it’s an English celeb, but really the question is whether Herbie is who they mean, or whether he’s filling out the pre-order as we speak. He’s like what we would all be like if we had a budget.)

Anyway, consider this a first look. I hope to get closer to the actual instrument soon.

Austrian Composer Peter Ablinger has transformed a child speaking so that it can be played as MIDI events on a mechanically-controlled piano, making the piano a kind of speech speaker. Via Matrixsynth, the readers at Hack a Day get fairly involved with how this may be working.

It seems not quite accurate to describe this as vocoding in the strictest sense, so much as a simple transformation to a (much) lower frequency resolution – that is, the 88 keys of the piano. Ablinger, for his part, describes the events as “pixels.” It’s pretty extraordinary that without a bandpass filter, you get something approximating the noisy sibilance of the speech, but this seems to be the result of having lots of events (that is, lots of resolution in terms of time). Edit: Listening again, the short answer to how you can hear so much of the voice through the piano seems to be, you can’t; the original is almost certainly mixed in. It’s nonetheless an interesting effect, and I’d like to hear the piano on its own. In other words, the basic process is, 1) convert the sound spectrum of the recorded voice to a series of MIDI events, and 2) play back the translated MIDI file. You can see that the MIDI playback is accomplished with Pd (Pure Data) running on a Windows Linux/KDE netbook, though it’s not clear what was used to do the original conversion. (The screen shot with side-by-side audio and MIDI appears as though it may be for demonstration purposes, only.)

Correction: The work is absolutely done in custom software developed by the composer in Pd (Pure Data). It’s an ideal tool for the job, and free and open source. I wouldn’t dare try to replicate the results here, but this is fantastic inspiration for playing with sound in Pd.

One Windows tool that’s capable of the job is TS Audiotomidi, as observed by Hack a Day spacecoyote. Whether or not that’s what’s at work here – and it may well be – that utility is itself interesting. Edit: Yeah, far more likely the whole thing was done in Pd. And Pd should be up to the task.

TS-AudioToMIDI

Of course, this is to say nothing of the lovely work done on the mechanical piano. It’s a beautiful piece. Here’s hoping some government bureaucrats got the message of the declaration. Now, we just need a chorus of something really loud – say a thousand trumpets – shouting out the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

jumping beans & .tape. from la bisogno on Vimeo.

What might a jar full of Mexican jumping beans sound like if composing their own ambient music? Scott Worley points us to a musical experiment by his labelmate Daniel Romero aka .tape, on netlabel yo.yo.pang!.
.tape programmed a sound environment in the free multimedia patching environment Pd (Pure Data). Contact microphones listen for the beans to jump, then use Pd’s onset detection (an analysis for transients) to trigger the sounds. Daniel reports the technique is “easy, but wholly effective.”

I’ll say – the music winds up being quite lovely, and rather than having a boring software-based random event generator, there’s something mesmerizing about watching the beans. You can download a free MP3/OGG file of the track, as well (and it sounds as though more projects may be coming):

pet-o-matic [asociación cultural la bisogno]

Descripción original en Español:

empezamos esta serie con la picante unión entre el músico Daniel Romero (aka .tape. ) y Pancho, Emiliano y Marcos, tres frijoles saltarines mexicanos

Sonidos y programación por .tape. secuenciación en directo por los 3 frijoles saltarines mexicanos micrófono de contacto + un “onset detection” en pd para disparar los sonidos. fácil pero rotundamente efectivo.

In other Pd news, the creators of the RjDj interactive/generative iPhone music app, which employs Pd patches, will be holding another sprint. This one will be located in London October 2-4.

It’s a strange and wonderful sampling instrument and live rig, capable of mangling and remixing live, synced to tempo. It’s proof that live computer performance doesn’t have to be in only one tool, or use one technique. It’s a ready-to-play, affordable instrument you can pick up and use. It’s a Reaktor patch gurus can pick apart and learn from, along with other resources from one of Reaktor’s masters. It’s a new blog and an opportunity to talk about live performance. It’s an EP release.

It’s actually all of these things – a tool, but more than a tool. The Finger, a US$79 / EUR 69 instrument, is a product, first and foremost, created by master live electronic performer and hacker Tim Exile. Tim is such a dedicated Reaktor user that he once managed to give himself a repetitive stress injury from connecting patch cords. (Not recommended.) You can run this thing out of the box using the free Kore Player, or get in deeper with a full version of Kore, or get into the patch itself with a copy of Reaktor 5 (also included in Komplete 5 and 6). It’s quite a product, too. I could try to explain it, but I couldn’t possibly do as good a job as Tim does in the video.

I’m not sure I agree with the marketing material’s claim that this is “a new type of live performance and remix effect.” In fact, Reaktor, Max/MSP, and other tools have led to all sorts of similar, original performance tools. Unlike going into a gig with just an Ableton Live set (something I’m doing in, literally, fifteen minutes), having a custom tool means focusing on performance techniques. And “new” hardly matters – Tim is a ninja at working with Reaktor’s deep sound DSP layer, Core (not to be confused with Kore). Whether it’s new or not, this is the ultimate patch from one of Reaktor’s masters. Along with Reaktor creator Stephan Schmitt’s Spark, it’s proof that sound packs from NI – or anyone else for that matter – don’t have to be limited to stock presets.

More than that, though, The Finger is connected to a music release by Tim, and is already triggering discussion of live performance and sound design – issues that go beyond any one tool. Tim has started a new blog to talk about his own take on live performance, starting with more info on his EP and some tracks you can hear:

http://thenowwave.blogspot.com/

Other folks I know have picked up The Finger and started to play with it, including the underlying Reaktor patch. Most notably, see Richard Devine transform The Finger from a Sound-Like-Tim-Exile machine into a Richard-Devine-Sonic-Insanity-Generator. (See, just because you use someone else’s tool doesn’t have to mean you need to sound like them.) With Max for Live coming, hackers getting smarter and slicker with open source tools like Processing, ChucK, SoundCollider, and Pd, and techno-literacy again on the rise – more connected than ever by these Interwebs – I think we could be in store for a really wonderful age of creativity, in which people make part of the craft of music making the craft of tool making, as well. Designing a tool, after all, is designing a system, in the same way that composition (in any medium) is about designing a system. Finally, instead of keeping that to ourselves, we can actually share the whole process.

In the meantime, let’s watch those videos, on Reaktor, The Finger, and more.

Richard Devine takes on The Finger:

Native Instruments The Finger vs Richard Devine from Richard Devine on Vimeo.

Tim Exile performing in Reaktor:

Tim shows his Reaktor-based setup – not just The Finger, but beyond:

Related tools:

Updated based on feedback in comments See also…

Sugar Bytes Artillery2, which focuses more on effects – and offers a whopping amount of effects variety, from step-sequenced buffer scratchers to vocoding. As with The Finger, the idea is to map effects to keys.

Rekkerd notes that Sugar Bytes has just discounted Artillery2 to 50% through October. Devoted loop manglers will buy both. I’m going to wait for a Richard Devine video in which he routes Artillery2, Lucifer, and The Finger together in one chain, then randomizes all the settings – your move, Richard.

The Lucifer plug-in is now discontinued, but Devine Machine offer a range of related looper/performance tools – from the practical tools to the manglers.

The basic ideas here I think are worth copying: making use of the keyboard to control things live rather than having modulation all running automatically, routing different effects together for mangled results, and loop recording and effects that are synced it time are all useful concepts to combine. I’d love to see people push those concepts in various directions, and the exact combination of ingredients you want is likely to be personal, so it’s well-suited to DIY concoctions, too.

Take a weekend, and make something: that’s the challenge behind the Music Hack Day, which joins a growing phenomenon of events built around collective creation. (CDM held its own tangible interface hackday online, which I definitely hope to follow up soon!) Initiated by Dave Haynes of music sharing service Soundcloud, the Hack Day has already hit London. Many of the events were Web app-based and focused on consumption rather than creation of music, but we also saw a chordal synth plug-in and beer bottle percussion instrument.

The Berlin Hack Day, which wound up earlier today, offers still more projects focused on the creation side of music hacking. Having Ableton and Native Instruments as sponsors likely helped the mood. And as you’d expect from one of the world capitals of creative hacking, Berliners don’t disappoint.

Among the projects: a beautiful, elegant 3D sequencer, a fun bird-and-sky multitouch soundmaker with multitouch trackpad input, and a robotic xylophone controlled by monome. Someone even worked out a way to turn NI’s Maschine into a rhythm game, complete with Street Fighter sounds.

I’ve got some of my favorite projects here, but see also an eyewitness report (in English and Italian) at Audio News Room:
Just back from Music Hack Day Berlin
… and keep your eye on the wiki:
Berlin Hack Submissions

xylobot run by monome from robb on Vimeo.

Monomist Rob Böhnke and Ramsey Arnaoot created one of my favorite hackday projects so far: a monome-controlled robotic xylophone. The ingredients: one monome grid controller, one Java application for step sequencing to the output, one Arduino open source controller board, and one terrific xylophone “robot” made of an array of servos that strike the bars of the instrument. Oh, and some hot glue and wood, of course.

Project details

Debugging

Audio loop

Of course, what’s especially impressive is nailing this in just a weekend – imagine what they could do with more time and iterations.

Proof that musical visualizers don’t always have to be trippy, futuristic, Tron-like 3D landscapes (and that’s me speaking as a fan of such things), Gernot Poetsch instead chose a whimsical environment with clouds and cartoon birds, inspired by the graphic identity of Twitter. (No actual Twitter is involved, meaning you lose the, ahem, unreliable, buggy, unfiltered chat network but keep the cutesy happy sky! Works for me!)

The visuals are built in Quartz Composer, which via OSC transmits messages to synthesis language ChucK for noisemaking. The surprise is, the multitouch input is not a Lemur or an iPhone – it’s the new MacBook touchpad under Snow Leopard!

iLoveAcid is a beautiful-looking nodal sequencer by Jakob Penca which uses wireframe “tracks” to guide music playback through a sequencer, transmitting events to your soundmaker of choice via MIDI or OSC. By using curved timelines and connections, it’s a veritable model railroad of music, in which formations combine to form more complex structures instead of simply stepping across a grid. Despite appearances, it is so far only two-dimensional – but then, the z displacement could easily be assigned to some form of modulation. I’m really eager to see the video of this.

One ingredient: Processing, which makes it easier to write visual code and to connect to Java libraries.

Project Page

The hardware controller for Native Instruments’ Maschine software drum machine has been adapted to other software, like Ableton Live. But this is surely the first time it’s been made into a game. Using Maschine’s MIDI output as a game control and sounds from Street Fighter, MaschineFighter is a simple, Simon-style rhythm game. Unlike Simon, though, there’s a twist – instead of rote patterns generated in advance, you face off against a friend and try to out-rhythm each other, battle style. I think it’s actually a pretty brilliant idea, and could become a new sensation for us electronic music nerds – not to mention, it’ll finally test our rhythm in a way electronic performance often does not. (Correction: It is Mac-only, making use of the PYMIDI Objective-C based library, which, since everything else that starts with “Py” usually means Python – a la jThings that mean Java – I assumed, incorrectly, was built on Python. But anyway, if you like the idea, carry on! And, actually, having a pure Objective-C CoreMIDI interface is also pretty awesome.)

Hoping for a video of this, too.

If you have a project that didn’t make this list, or if you add documentation after the fact, let us know.